By Cat Carroll
Mental health reporting presents unique challenges for journalists, requiring careful attention to ethical considerations, trust-building with vulnerable sources and a nuanced approach to complex issues. As public awareness of mental health concerns grows, so does the need for thoughtful coverage that balances accuracy with sensitivity.
Hannah Furfaro, a mental health reporter at the Seattle Times, embodies these principles in her work. She joined the Seattle Times in 2019 and is an inaugural member of the outlet’s Mental Health Project, an initiative focused on covering the growing mental health crisis in Seattle, Washington State and beyond.
Furfaro’s work consistently elevates the voices at the center of public health issues through thoughtful, ethical reporting. She was awarded the 2025 Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics for her project, “High Risk: Youth and addiction in Washington state,” where she brought to light the barriers preventing young people from accessing treatment for opioid addiction in Washington.
Furfaro spoke with us about her approach to ethical reporting on mental health issues and the challenges of covering vulnerable populations. This article has been edited for clarity and brevity.
How do you navigate providing nuanced reporting on complex public health issues while making your stories accessible to readers?
I’ve found that some topics really just do not lend themselves well to a breaking news format, for instance stories about addiction and serious mental illness. These are the types of stories that require building trust with sources over time. They’re really not topics where I feel it’s easy to drop in and get to know someone one day and then publish a story about them the next.
This issue becomes even more complicated when I’m writing about youth, where there’s always that extra layer of either parental consent or, if the teens don’t have parents who are being supportive of them, figuring out another way to be able to report their story in an ethical way. That might mean not using their full name or any of their name. We have a lot of conversations (in our newsroom) about how reporting on vulnerable individuals should look.
How do you build trust with sources who may have experienced trauma or who may be wary of media portrayals of mental health issues?
One of the most important things for me as a mental health reporter is interviewing and working with people who are actually interested in telling their story. I am never pressuring sources to participate. One of the first questions that I’ll ask someone who either reaches out to me or that I learn about is why they want to be featured in a news story or a feature story about this topic. And I listen really carefully to their answers.
If someone is really hopeful that their story will spark change for them individually and they’re really thinking that whatever I write could change their life, that is worrisome to me, because that’s not something I can guarantee. For people who want to tell their story because they want to see systems change, or they want someone who’s had a similar experience to feel heard, that to me feels more ethical because they aren’t banking on me to write a story that causes some really big change in their life.
A lot of it has to do with figuring out why someone would want to talk to me. I’m really not trying to convince people to participate.
When interviewing vulnerable individuals for stories on mental health and addiction, what core principles guide your interactions to ensure ethical reporting?
Every situation is really unique. I did a series of stories a couple of years ago when there was a pretty tragic situation going on in the children’s hospitals in Washington State. A lot of teenagers with developmental disabilities and mental health conditions ended up being stuck inside hospitals for weeks or months at a time because they were violent at home, and they needed help, but there weren’t services that were actually appropriate for them. Their parents would bring them to the hospital, and they would essentially not leave for weeks or months because hospitals couldn’t find anywhere to send them.
I talked to a lot of moms for that story, and one of the moms who I spent a lot of time with, we had talked a lot over the phone, but when it was time to interview her in person, she asked to have her mom in the room. She said early on that she might want to take breaks, she might cry, and I’d experienced that as a reporter before, but I really appreciated that she set those boundaries and parameters.
I think about that interaction a lot, and have used that to guide how I speak with vulnerable sources. I give them the option to have breaks whenever they want, I tell them if there’s an important person to bring along to the interview, please bring them. I think about a comfortable place for them — maybe it’s their home, maybe it’s in public, and I give them that option.
I’ve interviewed a lot of teenagers, and I find that those interactions are all really different. Some of them like to meet at coffee shops, some like to meet near where they go to school. And for those interviews, it’s really important that I’m talking to the parents, guardians or important adults in their life first to gauge what’s going on with this teen right now. I want to make sure they’re in a place of stability, or enough stability, where they could participate in this. So, there are a lot of questions around what will keep people safe and comfortable in the interview setting and afterward.
Your work often emphasizes solutions alongside challenges. How does this solutions-focused approach enhance your journalism and its impact on readers?
When I’m thinking about what might be a solution, or a piece of the solution, I try to better understand what has already happened and what has been tried. Usually if you go back far enough, you’ll find people and organizations who have tried to tackle a problem before but, for one reason or another, have failed, or their success didn’t last.
Looking at those efforts often helps me think about what sort of solutions story would make sense now. My project last year on youth addicted to fentanyl that was awarded the Shadid Award, involved a story that looked back 50 years in history at how Washington State had built up and then, unfortunately, let deteriorate their addiction treatment system for youth.
That story, along with the timeline of what was going on with state policy, helped me think about what we could do differently now. That historical piece ended up being paired with a narrative about a local team in Seattle that’s very nimble, small and doesn’t have a lot of funding, but they’re essentially doing all of the things that would need to be done to engage youth, build trust with youth and get them access to (opioid use disorder) medication. I was able to pair a solution with the history, which was hopefully a powerful way of letting readers know this isn’t the only solution or the first solution. We’ve tried these things before, but here’s our beacon of light in the darkness right now.
What responsibility do you feel journalists have in shaping public discourse and policy around health issues?
I think we have an enormous responsibility. I really approach my reporting from an equity and access point of view. There’s so many vulnerable people who are not able to get access to our systems of care in the same way that people with resources are able to get access to care. When I was reporting on addiction last year, one of my big findings was that youth are having so much more trouble than adults — and we already know that adults are having trouble getting access to addiction treatment.
Teasing out who, among those who are struggling, is struggling the most, is what journalists can do. We can look at data, we can do reporting with experts, with people who are experiencing struggles getting access to care, and figure out the best stories to tell about a particular issue. Looking at state laws and trying to figure out what protections are in place for a specific population that I’m focusing on, and what could be done to strengthen those protections or funding — that is the role of journalists. And I think it’s an incredibly powerful one.
Reporting on emotionally heavy topics can take a personal toll. What self-care practices or boundaries have you found most effective for protecting your own wellbeing while reporting on difficult subjects?
I’ve been really open with my editor about how I’m doing as a particular story is moving along. These are really heavy topics, and especially when we get closer to publication, when we’re doing a lot of fact checking and are at the end of the road on something that’s been tough for a long time, I feel those are the moments where I’m starting to burn out.
My editor will find smaller, lighter stories for me to work on as I’m pursuing a big, heavy project. Whether it’s a story about the therapeutic benefits of pets or a story about cold plunging, these are tangential to my normal beat, but they’re lighter, they’re community-oriented and they give me an opportunity to do something that isn’t so heavy.
What story or project are you most proud of?
The project I worked on, “High Risk: Youth and addiction in Washington state,” is one that I’m most proud of. It was honestly the most emotionally difficult series that I’ve ever worked on. I was spending a lot of time with teenagers who had experienced extreme trauma, some had experienced abuse, some had been sex trafficked, nearly all of them had survived near fatal overdoses and many of them had parents or boyfriends who had died from overdoses.
The level of trauma was unbelievable, and it was not my job to be a therapist, or even necessarily to help these teens get connected to resources in a formal way, but I did find myself getting really close to these teens and their parents and their other family members, because you have to in order to tell these stories. I think there were a lot of things that could have kept this project from ever publishing. A couple of the teens relapsed during the project that caused us to pause the reporting for several months. We weren’t sure if we’d ever get back to it. There were so many ethical decisions that we had to make along the way, and I’m really proud that we were able to do the stories that we did.
This is a population that’s often not written about, just because it’s so hard to do this reporting, and so I feel really lucky and grateful for the sources that they stuck with us.
Cat Carroll was a 2024-25 fellow at the Center for Journalism Ethics and an undergraduate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The Center for Journalism Ethics encourages the highest standards in journalism ethics worldwide. We foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism.